Twitter Co-Founder Releases Social-Search App Jelly

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on Tuesday released Jelly, a new app that lets people attach pictures to questions and then seek answers from their social networks.

It’s Quora meets Instagram. If you have a “what is this” type of question, snap a photo. Jelly sends the question out to your circle of Facebook and Twitter friends that also use Jelly.

At first glance, the concept doesn’t seem much different than how people already use their go-to search engines, like Google. In a company blog post, Jelly drew on the wise words of Albert Einstein to argue that “information is not knowledge.”

“Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks,” the post continues. “It turns out that getting answers from people is very different from retrieving information with algorithms.”

While some answers easily come from search engines, others are best found through a human connection, such as travel advice or birthday-party ideas — two example Q&As already posed in the app by Jelly staff and investors. But these queries could just as easily be asked through crowd-sourcing on other social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Quora.

In an interview, Stone explained Jelly will be different because of the expectation that if you ask a question, you will get an answer. In contrast, on other social media sites a question is not guaranteed an answer.

Jelly is banking on the idea that “the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other,” according to its blog post. But the app may tax that willingness. It imports a user’s connections from Facebook or Twitter, so the bigger a user’s network, the more questions he or she will likely see.

Stone says that the company has to “tune up a few things.”

“We don’t want it to feel like you have to clean out the inbox. That’s the last thing we want,” says Stone. He says the seemingly bottomless stack of questions appeared because more people signed up for the app than they had anticipated. He did not know the final number of first-day signups.

Over time, Stone says the goal is to improve the algorithm so that Jelly sends each question to specific users who are most likely to help.

As it collects more data, Jelly could take on different uses. Take location, for example.

“You could imagine way down the line in the future you’re in Dolores Park and you ask Jelly if anyone has any sunscreen and somebody 30 feet away stands up and hands you one,” says Stone.

Stone co-founded Jelly in 2013 with Ben Finkel, who came to Twitter after his social Q&A service Fluther was acquired in 2010. The app is available for on Apple 's App Store and Google Play.

Jelly’s bench of investors has a deep Twitter pedigree. Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet, an early Twitter investor, is on the board of directors, as is Twitter Chairman Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, an early Twitter employee. Other investors include Bono and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.